Life is More Than a Meme.

Ann Althouse has a couple of interesting blog posts today, the first introduces Sarah Pulliam Baily’s column in the Washington Post that talks about “Mommy Blogs” and how they are being replaced by Instagram and its sanitary filters, or Twitter.  The second is the real meat of Althouse’s discussion of Baily’s piece in Whatever Happened to Blogging, she talks about the evolution of blogging away from the grit into a stylized and glamorized depiction of Mommy’s life.

For what it’s worth I think Ann misses a couple of points in this whole rise and fall of blogging.

First, we tend to jump on board with fads.  It doesn’t matter what the movement is if someone tells us it is the “in thing” we jump on board.  But soon there is another “in thing” and we jump off the last thing to join the new thing.  Only the die-hards remain to carry on that last most-greatest fad.

I can remember back to the 1960’s when bell bottom pants, neon colors, and shoulder length men’s hair became the rage.  They lasted for quite a while, but eventually, they were replaced by different styles, colors and hair length, except for those who decided to hold out because they were individuals and didn’t follow the changing fads (except when they did).

With the advent of the blog-o-sphere as a forum for publishing your opinions, ideas, and photos it became the “in thing.”  With the evolution of FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter the blogs became old hat and the trendy people soon left it.  It takes far less effort to put a sentence on the new venues than it does to put together a blog.  As Ann pointed out blogging offered the ability to earn money from your writing, and who doesn’t like that?  But I suspect most people never earned more than a few pennies (like being a Tupperware hostess) and soon tired of the effort. 

I think the second reason is easier to understand, writing is, after all, hard work and routinely sitting down to write is an effort that requires some discipline.  People who enjoy the exercise will remain, those who don’t will find easier ways to express themselves.  The newest platforms allow us to seemingly express ourselves without effort.  We post a picture, we write a line, and we’re done, or we find someone who has already done that and we share it with friends to tell them “this is how I feel too.”  Knowing we’ve shared our true feelings, we can sit back and wait for people to like it.

If we want to engage in a political debate, all we have to do is find a meme that fits our emotion and plaster it on one of the modern platforms as if it were the most insightful and true idea ever.  The legitimacy of the words is hardly ever questioned and you can now move on to the next opinion or emotion you want the world to know about. 

But everything changes.  Even as I write, memes are being replaced by emoticons to simplify even further our communication process.  In the evolution, we seem to be returning to the origin of language with hieroglyphics and other pictographs carved in mud tablets.